YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Burnett

lines on the record: 83
first: 2024-02-21
most recent: 2024-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“When I speak, sometimes one of the things I'll speak about is building Bitcoin to be money for a thousand years. Most people think I would say in a very myopic way, they may look back two years and forward six months or vice versa. They're very narrow. And I see that happen a lot in the industry. Instead of really stepping back and say, let's look, let's take a several decade view or a couple century view of things. And I know it's hard to do. It's hard to make money thinking that way, but I think from the perspective of making sure that we design Bitcoin, by that I mean the entire ecosystem, all the components of the ecosystem, such that we don't create vulnerabilities. Usually those are centralization points, but they could also be single points of failure. So if you envision a world where only bitmain makes chips and then I'm not picking on them specifically, but if you have only Bitmain making chips, only bitmain making systems.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just say, you know, it's a long path. You know, we all want it to go quickly. You mentioned some other folks, you know, like Blockstream and Block and others are working on chips. I am very supportive of what all those folks are doing. I will look seriously. I already have looked at some of the chip designs there. We need that this development is really important to the development of a healthy ecosystem. And I think to a certain degree, separating the ASIC from the system is a very important. It will drive innovation, first of all. You get the best system designers and the best chip designers, and they each specialize, right? I think that that's a natural market. It's a natural thing to happen in a market. I think more importantly, it creates diversity.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rains, something happens, you have a bunch more water flow, and boom, you have some extra. So, what do you do? Well, you take and you put newer, more efficient equipment that runs essentially 24 by 7 in the baseload. And then you have the other stuff standing there. So in those, you know, okay, there was a rainstorm for two days. You're going to have an extra 300 kilowatts. Okay, great. Then run the old stuff because it's free energy at that point. We design kind of that way. And so I think the same sort of principle would apply in. This AI situation”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I will say is, it's likely that in those situations that this is part of a cascade of technology. If I was designing such a center, if I was putting up a new AI center, I probably wouldn't go put S21s and high-end Bitcoin mining equipment there that is kind of sitting idly. Waiting for the energy to free up to go run for a few hours or a few days and turn on and off that I think, Bloody, if I had a bunch of old 17 older S19s right now that are toward the end of their useful life in normal circumstances, I would probably locate those there. They're kind of the backup. You know, we have that sort of situation with Hydro in a hydro situation, you often have a base level that is produced on a constant basis, relatively constant basis.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a service thing. I don't know if it's coincidental or not, but it is an amazing observation. And I do think it is a very logical extension of this.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think you've very accurately represented that. Because as right now we're at a point in AI where if you're running some sort of AI application that's somewhat similar to Bitcoin where the demand is almost 24 by 7, there's so much money and infrastructure being thrown at it. It's hard for me to believe that every AI center is going to be able to maintain a constant load. And so I think that that problem is definitely going to come. I'll say one other thing though, and that's that maybe the machines that Sit next to the AI machines aren't just mining Bitcoin. I've talked to you”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This current form factor. And so there probably will be one of those resistance points to this will be this. But ultimately, I think that the efficiency and the cost effectiveness of these other designs will overpower the legacy. The need to be in the legacy because it just runs out of gas. It just cannot dissipate the thermals properly and all that.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Gateway wasn't even the top vendor. We were like number five, right? So just to put that in perspective, we're a very small industry. I'm not sure how big we'll ever get, honestly. I mean, relative to these other industries, I'm not exactly sure. But what we're trying to do, like I said with the M5R group, is really change this vector. The truth is you mentioned something in full transparency. Like one of the things that we have to change is the people making containers and designing facilities and all that they've gotten pretty used to.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commercial level, probably see things like hey, the access to power supplies and different components and things like that, they're a little bit overpriced relative to other markets. But I think that's largely because of volume, right? Bitcoin mining is still a tiny, tiny industry. There's a few million machines sold annually. And I like to put it back in perspective. Gateway was building 10 million PCs a year. So the Bitcoin mining industry as a whole still isn't even at where Gateway was 20 years ago in unit volume.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“my opinion poorly done and not built for a large scale. The server market, the traditional server market, what you would see in a traditional data center, standard, there is a standard rack amount size, usually delineated and used per unit, right? So you could have, for instance, the Bifier equipment that we used to work with was all done in that same vein. And we still have some of it deployed in some of our operations, but it's like a six U form factor, which means 19 inches wide. Forgive me if I'm off a little bit. I don't know, nine inches high or something on that order. It's a very standard form factor. Also means that a lot of the components that go in that are standard too, that some of the power supplies and some of the things that go in there, you can leverage other industries that are using those same components. So as a system designer, there's a lot of appeal to that. Those involved in Bitcoin mining, whether they're at the hobby level or the”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, it means much higher energy densities, first of all. So in a given form factor, you're going to see much higher energy density. Now, the AI market's also seeing the same thing, though. Know we're seeing like what, for instance, companies like HP are trying to do with NVIDIA to do this high performance computing for AI. We're seeing the same sort of massive energy densities that the M fiber group is trying to move toward. And it does present issues. You know, for instance, a machine today, a common machine used in Bitcoin mining like an S19, might be about three kilowatts. And it sits in that shoebox form factor, which is pretty awkward, by the way. Really.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truly move toward enterprise class computing. And that means different form factors, higher energy densities, and just to give people a sniff of what we're working toward is a chip that would enable, for instance, single unit hashing power on the order of two to three petah hashes or one unit.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, he believes in Bitcoin. Believes in Bitcoin, as do the other members of the team. Which, by the way, are no slouchers themselves. We won't go through individual resumes, but they're folks from Intel and Broadcom and companies like that. That are also part of this team And we're focused initially. I'm acting on the board of advisors of the company. And we are focused initially on the enterprise market. So we can maybe talk time permitting about where I think mining equipment will go, but I think we'll see a divergence instead of one kind of machine. We're seeing a little of that already, right? We're seeing the BitX folks and some other people trying to do things in different Sanchas. But I think we're going to see that enterprise market.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I can provide some insight and help as a system guy, as a guy connected to pools and doing this. Does he believe in Bitcoin?”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, I think it's more appropriate to say, I am working with him. Him. I am not, this is not leading the ASIC design by any stretch of the imagination.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be considered the godfather of it, yes. I mean, there's a lot of people involved. I mean, It's kind of like who's the inventor of the PC exactly the godfather, the central point of. Whole thing coming together would be bump sue.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Bum Su is, among others, a former employee of Samsung. He would be credited by most people as being the godfather of the solid state disc. So he comes with pretty strong.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially the kind of ASIC that we use in the Bitcoin world, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars even really when you get down to it in the very end. So I connected to a group. It's led by a guy named Bam Sukim. The company's called M5ers. Give them such.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TSMC, and they design the systems. If you look at the PC market, though, the PC market has Intel, it has AMD, it's had other companies in the past, several other companies have been part of that. And they are distinct from the system makers. In other words, the chip guys do what the chip guys do, which is develop logic and work on wafer processes and things like that. the system guys do what they do, which is they interact with the users and they build the machines that fit a specific need. I wanted to be involved in that. I got connected. So to fulfill my vision, I needed to do that. Building an ASIC is inexpensive proposition.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chance, Preston, to see what I'm doing on the energy side where you visited our facility at the Ocean Launch. Where we own our own small hydroelectric facility, among other things. But we're trying to do that. We're trying to build on that stack. Well, the next piece in the stack is the ASIC, the chip, not the machine. And by the way, it's very, very important. We can talk about this a little bit more later. But I think it's very important to when you use the word ASIC, refer to ACIP, an application-specific integrated circuit. And by the way, ASIC is not specific to Bitcoin either. I think a lot of Bitcoiners don't understand that they've been around for over 30 years. I worked on my first ASIC probably in the late 80s for power main. It was a power management circuit for charging. They've been around for a long, long time. They have really nothing specific to do with Bitcoin. But as you said, today BitMain dominates the market. Bitmain makes chips in partnership with...”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can tell you a fair amount today. And as I already lead it in, I think that one of the things I want to give a little bit more background, I believe in self-sovereignty as a minor, I have something I call the minor stack. And if you can visualize this, it's the energy, it's the chips, it's the systems, operational excellence in the pools. If you want to truly be a miner and you want to deliver to the world Bitcoin and block space, then unless you control all pieces of that, at least to some degree, meaning own it, you're not self-sovereign. It means you are dependent or you require somebody else's permission to fulfill your vision. So for barefoot and for what I'm trying to accomplish personally, that's what I'm after. I want to own pieces of that. And you had a”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't have the ability to design our own systems at that time, but we did. So we did the next best thing, which was we signed an agreement with BitFury, which was large European maker of Bitcoin mining equipment and became the US distributor and service center for Bitfurry equipment. So that gave us an entree 2018, 2019, 2020 to enter the Bitcoin world. And we migrated from providing systems to providing hosting systems to now largely, I guess you would call it self-mining, although we usually do it through partnerships. But we do have a small hosting business and self-mining, but our real desire is to get back all the way to designing our own systems.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't work well. And they rarely come together. They never meet their timelines. They basically never meet their goals and objectives. And what I saw was this piece of software. That's how I was looking at it, right? With all these tentacles and interdependencies, said this isn't going to work. And then peeling deep into what really is proof of stake. And that led me really to Bitcoin and proof of work. And so I started to appreciate and understand first from a technical perspective, but then seeing the Austrian in me starting to see the monetary policy and the issuance and these sorts of things. And the sound money principles really coming out in Bitcoin. So we pivoted at that point. Unfortunately, we didn't have access to a chip at the time. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit later.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That period, and they failed me. I started looking elsewhere, like, what's wrong? How can this be fixed? So I found Austrian thought at that point. As I started to, after getting like this order done and starting to sell this Ethereum equipment, I started to look deeper technically at what Ethereum really was. Because at first, this was just a computer guy building computers. That's what that was. And then I started looking at it. And so first, I looked at the technical aspects of Ethereum. And I started to get uneasy. I could see the technical complexity that they were trying to tackle. And if you've ever been involved in big software projects, you realize that.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what we did. We built this design, got these things to market, and did quite well with it. A little sidelight, just I have a background in economics as well, more of a macro thing. I'm not on par with our buddies like James Lavish or Larry Lepard or Lyn Alden in terms of my macro, but I try to at least be proficient. And I have been, and it got turned on to Austrian economics in the early 2000s, about 2001, 2002. When the dot com bubble burst Soured heavily. And so I started looking for something different. A short version of that story is I had done very well. I was part of the gateway IPO. I had done well. And then I cashed out a lot in the late 90s, only to see a lot of that wealth evaporate. In the crash, right? And I had put a lot of faith in traditional financial advisors and wealth advisors.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 to 12 in terms of market share in the world, something on that order. But we hadn't made it yet. We hadn't IPO'd yet. The IPO is still a little bit away. So we had to have a little bit of that gunslinger attitude to chase and try to get to the top of the pile. As I said, they were grateful for that. And so when we called up, some of you might remember in 2017.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were at Gateway, for those of you who don't know Gateway well, and you may even write week, we tried to push the edge. That's our position in the marketplace was we were a little more consumer oriented than business oriented. And we tried to push the envelope. We were tried to push and the value especially that you could get in this case graphics performance at a certain level at a price that nobody else had seen before. And so I'm sure that's what we were chasing with NVIDIA. You know, they were a startup. They had some great architectural things. If always, you know, it's amazing, by the way, for 30 years, they have been able to maintain that technical edge, my hat's off to them. But yeah, there was a lot of risk associated in that too. But it's the only way to have been successful in the early 90s, the PC market was trying to sort itself out. Gateway was at the time probably about a billion dollar company, probably...”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't remember the specifics, but it was probably given where we were at that time. This would have been, I don't know, 92, 93 something in that order. It was probably an order for 50 to 100,000 graphics chips. At the time, we would have always had a plan B. I'm sure we, I can't tell your specific. I'm sure we had a plan B, which was, hey, if we were designing for a specific desktop model, right?”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were the first ones to put their chip on a motherboard. Keith was the head of desktop engineering working for me and who works for me now and as part of our team. So we were integral to kind of that little start for NVIDIA at that time.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you do that? And I'll make that part of the story short. I didn't know much about cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or any of those things at that time. When I was a computer guy and I just looked at it as a computer guy and ended up saying yes, I started a company, which we now know as barefoot mining, to build those. And it was about, ended up being about a $6 million order. So I started a company to fulfill that, which pretty lucky, right? To get a $6 million order. It's your first PO. But I looked at it as a computer guy, and I had contacts along with Keith Thomas, who's the president at Barefoot along with me. We're both X-Gateway people. A little story now that NVIDIA is what Eclipsing Amazon and MarketCap is when they were a startup trying to find their first customer, the very first customer of NVIDIA was Kateway.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My background goes all the way back to the mid 80s and my early PC development days, so right at the cost. And so I didn't have something that exciting. And so life was just kind of bland. But anyway, in 2017, one night I got a phone call. I was giving my wife credit for this. It was nine o'clock at night. My phone rang. It was a Seattle phone number. I did not recognize the phone number. And I wasn't going to answer it like probably most people don't want to answer, right? And my wife said, answer it. I don't want to. She said, answer it. I did. It turned out it was an old gateway acquaintance. And he said, Bob, I'm starting a company. I raised a bunch of money. I need 300 Ethereum mining servers set it up turning into 800 Ethereum mining servers a little later as fast as I can. I can't get the NVIDIA chips. I can't get anybody to design something professional.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost like that was a different person, but it was really a magical time. And it leads a little bit to the question you asked me, which was how I got to Bitcoin. Because I'll be honest, that I feel like when I left that industry, which was in 2004, I had spent about 20 years there, I got a little lost. I got almost say I was like a little lost, not in some major way, but I was kind of wondering what's my purpose because I had been through this thing that was just so big. He's a behemoth. I woke up every day with this purpose. And we were.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, thank you for remembering for the older members of the audience. Hopefully, you remember well, because we were quite successful, and not to pat myself on the back. And it was obviously a massive team. I was part of it. But, you know, as you said, we had about 25,000 employees at one point. We had 400 retail stores. We had 10 billion in revenue. We were making about 10 million PCs a year. And it's almost hard to imagine now when I look back at it, what I went through. It's almost.”
2024-02-21 · We Study Billionaires · BTC170: Bitcoin's Hardware Future w/ Bob Burnett (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT