In this solo riff, I get back to basics with a simple question: what small, durable skills and systems will still matter through whatever economic “turning” we’re in? I start with baking bread—salt, flour, water, yeast—and how a tiny, profitable craft can outlast volatile cycles and even complement a Bitcoin-standard mindset of spending less than you make. From there I jump to homelab tinkering: wiring a basement while the walls are open, skipping flaky wireless for hard‑wired sensors, planning 240V circuits for a Bitcoin miner as a space heater and a small compute rack, and why muscle memory (in kitchens or shops) scales better than hype.

I also explore running your own AI: local models on a Mac mini or gaming rig, privacy and cost wins, and the growing ecosystem around Claude, Grok, and Llama. We talk practical automations (JSON wrangling, lightweight NLP), agentic helpers like Moltbot, peer‑to‑peer stacks such as Iroh, authenticating with Nostr keys, and even packaging an Android APK. Finally, a nod to ham radio as the original resilient communications layer. It’s a tour of resilient skills—from bread to bits—that you can start today and compound over time.

• 'The Fourth Turning' by William Strauss & Neil Howe: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/174648/the-fourth-turning-by-william-strauss/
• Bitcoin (community site): https://bitcoin.org/en/
• WhatsMiner (MicroBT) — ASIC miner brand: https://www.whatsminer.com/
• MicroBT (manufacturer of WhatsMiner): https://microbt.com/
• Kali Linux — Penetration Testing Distribution: https://www.kali.org/
• FaceTime — Apple Support: https://support.apple.com/facetime
• Mac mini — Apple: https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/
• Grok by xAI: https://grok.com/
• Claude by Anthropic: https://website.claude.com/
• Meta Llama — official GitHub models repo: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-models
• Moltbot (formerly “Clawdbot”): https://moltbotlab.com/
• Iroh — peer‑to‑peer networking stack: https://www.iroh.computer/
• Nostr protocol — canonical GitHub repo: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
• Build an Android APK — Android Developers: https://developer.android.com/build/build-for-release
• ARRL — The National Association for Amateur Radio: https://www.arrl.org/

In this episode of The Average Bitcoiner, I dive into the idea of government data accessibility and why public information should be truly public—available via API, rate-limited, and anchored to real-world, in-person identity through local jurisdictions. I explore how modern AI tools can scrape, analyze, and visualize county and school data, and share an experiment to publish transparent audits with Nostr-enabled feedback loops. Beyond the tech, I make the case that the most meaningful leverage we have is local: showing up in meatspace, building resilient community ties, and applying our skills, time, and resources where we live. I challenge listeners to do one above-average thing today: audit your local government, attend a school board or county meeting, and ask hard questions. With broken incentives, inflating budgets, and increasingly digital isolation, our strength is in intentional, physical community building—leading with example, fitness, grace, and clear boundaries. We can’t fix everything at once, but we can start local, build our frame, and make measurable progress—one county, one conversation, one act of service at a time.

I’m kicking off The Average Bitcoiner with a deep dive into my Ehash experiment: marrying Stratum V2 pooled‑mining shares with Cashu ecash to create a private, liquid IOU for work-in-progress hashpower. I walk through how mining shares are “almost blocks,” why they’re basically worthless until a payout, and how issuing ehash against validated shares can function like a pool’s accounting database—only open, auditable, and privacy-preserving. We explore the moving parts: locking ehash to an hpub, discovering and redeeming quotes, rotating Cashu keysets on each payout epoch, and why immediate keyset rotation lets mining continue without downtime while the previous epoch settles and melts to sats over Lightning. I also share a status update from the lab: wiring a Bitaxe via ESP‑Miner into a Stratum V2 translator and job declaration client, validating that ehash credits appear, and aiming next at full redemption via CLI before tackling a mobile wallet fork. Along the way, I touch on the broader context—variance smoothing and credit in mining pools, why Cashu (and Fedimint) can bridge to Lightning, the role of Rust, Noise, and keyset expiry, plus some practical dev tooling. The goal: reduce the economic size to bootstrap mining while keeping it permissionless, auditable, and above all, Bitcoin-aligned.

• 'Cashu – Open‑source Ecash': https://cashu.space/
• 'Cashu Documentation (NUTs, wallets, mints)': https://docs.cashu.space/
• 'Fedimint – Federated Ecash for Bitcoin': https://fedimint.org/
• 'Stratum V2 Protocol Specification': https://github.com/stratum-mining/sv2-spec
• 'Stratum V2 Protocol Libraries (SRI)': https://github.com/stratum-mining/stratum
• 'Braiins Pool (formerly Slush Pool)': https://braiins.com/pool
• 'Foundry USA Pool (official)': https://foundrydigital.com/enterprise-software/foundry-usa-pool/
• 'Lightning Network (overview by Lightning Labs)': https://lightning.network/
• 'Noise Protocol Framework': https://www.noiseprotocol.org/
• 'Rust Programming Language': https://rust-lang.org/
• 'Bitaxe – Open‑source Bitcoin Miner': https://bitaxe.org/
• 'ESP‑Miner firmware for Bitaxe (AxeOS)': https://github.com/bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner
• 'mprocs – Run multiple commands in parallel': https://github.com/pvolok/mprocs
• 'Cashu Nutshell – Wallet and Mint (reference implementation)': https://github.com/cashubtc/nutshell