Who doesn’t love a sequel? Raymond Hawkins sure does, and back by popular demand for another episode of fantastic industry insights, Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, joined the Hawk to talk about all sorts of things. Top of mind was how current events are shaping the crypto community and how crypto could impact the events unfolding in Europe.  

The current state of affairs could provide a new test for digital currency. Thiel pointed out in past wars; displaced citizens did not have many options for moving their money. “Crypto provides a unique thing in this world where sanctions have become essentially a weapon and weaponized,” Thiel said. In the matter of the war in Ukraine, the United States and its allies have used sanctions to shut off Russian access to banks. The only other bearer asset available for many people and businesses in this scenario is Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

One might ask if Crypto is a solution to transferring assets, could Russia use crypto to avoid sanctions? Thiel said that the daily trading of cryptocurrency and the total market cap prevents this idea from being scalable. “As a tool for sanction evasion, Bitcoin is not a good option,” Thiel stated.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, one trend is the decoupling of the correlation between bitcoin and equities. “All of a sudden, now there was a real use case for bitcoin that was very actual and urgent, and so you started seeing bitcoin move in the opposite direction of equities. Even bitcoin-related stocks which track the price of bitcoin started moving separately. So, there were days when the Dow and the Nasdaq would go down, yet bitcoin would go up, and you saw the Nasdaq-traded, bitcoin-related stocks, Like Marathon, for example, move in lockstep with bitcoin.”

The summer of 2021 brought news of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. This summer USC and UCLA rocked the landscape of college conferences once again. The schools announced they would leave the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten. The deserted conferences are shifting the narrative to expansion for survival.

After the summer 21 news from Texas and Oklahoma, it’s become clear that two conferences are working to separate. Elias Ellefsen said, “I love the move for USC and UCLA. I’m a big fan of the big conferences.” West coast football in the Big Ten will certainly make waves. “It’s an interesting move. Typically I think of west coast football as high-paced. I think it will bring an interesting dynamic to the league,” said Steve Skyes. Others argued that the success of USC and UCL would make the Big Ten ‘The conference of champions.”

What’s to come for the future of NCAA conferences is difficult to know. Will conferences survive, implode, or expand? Raymond Hawkins, the podcast host, said, “We’re not going to continue with five powerhouses, five conferences forever.” Kenny Nguyen pointed out the weakness of the Pac-12 in the wake of the news. “Pac 12 right now, it feels like it's bleeding a little bit. If Washington and Oregon dip, what do you have left?” questioned Nguyen. The debate continues to consider how media drives these changes and the potential of only having two to three leagues.

This group's conference champion predictions favor Baylor, Ohio State, Alabama, and Utah. There’s a rich insight into specific players, coaches, and each conference. Listen to Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast on Spotify or Apple.

The hats he wears are many: Chairman & Founder of Infrastructure Masons (iMason,) CEO of Virtual Power Systems, Co-Host of The Next Wave Podcast, and Founder & CEO of a strategic advisory and consulting service for Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and Investment firms. One might call him a living legend in the data storage space. Back by popular demand, Dean Nelson joined Not Your Father’s Data Center for another tremendous conversation with host Raymond Hawkins.

Nelson queued up some significant trends in the data storage space since his last visit that he was itching to discuss.

“If you think about our industry, today we have 7 million data center locations,” Nelson said. “These are places that have some type of compute in them. And there’s about 104 gigawatts of capacity built. That’s capacity that could be used. From a consumption standpoint, there’s 594 terawatt-hours of consumption. If you now equate that, that’s 2.4% of the total energy draw globally. Through iMasons, we created this baseline on purpose. And what it includes is three categories. So, digital infrastructure, in general, is providers, networks, and crypto.” Breaking down these categories helps define where the energy usage is going and how Nelson and his iMasons can find new ways to maximize the consumption of that capacity.

Even within the 594 terawatt-hours of consumption, Nelson said not all of that energy is consumed at once. Only roughly 67 gigawatts of the 104 gigawatts of power get consumed. That leaves at least 37 gigawatts unused around the globe. “And why is that,” Nelson asked. “That’s because of buffers and buffers, and everything else that happens from enterprise applications to cloud to data centers and everybody saving to ensure that they don’t have an issue.”

Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.” 

Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Data Centers, discussed this increasing accessibility in the context of data on Part Two of “Data Centers in Space” on Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast.   

Orbits Edge uses high-power compute in space before sending data to Earth. Mass amounts of data are captured, but there is a bottleneck in the transportation. Ward said, “Image capture is haystack generation, compute is needle finding,” said Ward. If you can only transport a fraction of the data haystack, it needs to be the high-quality “needles.”  

Data is shipped to countries through bands that have varying reliabilities and throughputs. A low-orbit satellite may conduct with a ground station for a certain distance, then have a fuzzy connection for another distance, and finally have no connectivity for several kilometers until it reaches the next ground station. High, dry locations are best for ground station connectivity. “What it comes down to is intermittent connectivity of variable throughputs of various windows of connectivity,” said Ward. 

Data is then transported from the ground station to a data center. Some ground stations have antennas to reduce the fiber run distance.  

Orbits Edge satellites range from the size of a dorm mini-fridge to the size of a regular fridge and weigh about 200 kilos. Despite the small size, Ward predicted that satellite data will play an increasingly heavy role in space and research stations, crystallography, space metallurgy, and ceramics.   

Rick Ward, CTO, and Founder of Orbits Edge, described how space is becoming increasingly accessible to laypeople. “We’re getting more and more to the place where I can see myself there. And that is a big deal. You don’t have a space-bearing civilization when the only people who go up there are less numerous than Olympic gold medalists.” 

Ward and Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Data Centers, discussed this increasing accessibility in the context of data on Part Two of “Data Centers in Space” on Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast.   

Orbits Edge uses high-power compute in space before sending data to Earth. Mass amounts of data are captured, but there is a bottleneck in the transportation. Ward said, “Image capture is haystack generation, compute is needle finding,” said Ward. If you can only transport a fraction of the data haystack, it needs to be the high-quality “needles.”  

Data is shipped to countries through bands that have varying reliabilities and throughputs. A low-orbit satellite may conduct with a ground station for a certain distance, then have a fuzzy connection for another distance, and finally have no connectivity for several kilometers until it reaches the next ground station. High, dry locations are best for ground station connectivity. “What it comes down to is intermittent connectivity of variable throughputs of various windows of connectivity,” said Ward. 

Data is then transported from the ground station to a data center. Some ground stations have antennas to reduce the fiber run distance.  

Orbits Edge satellites range from the size of a dorm mini-fridge to the size of a regular fridge and weigh about 200 kilos. Despite the small size, Ward predicted that satellite data will play an increasingly heavy role in space and research stations, crystallography, space metallurgy, and ceramics.   

International trade law expert reveals the difficult yet satisfying work that the CCIA performs to keep tech at consumers’ fingertips. 

Host Raymond Hawkins switches up the usual topic of data to bring listeners a lively discussion of March Madness picks.